last page of the zerO Books

I think I’ve posted this before, but it just made me laugh out loud again, and hence is worth posting again. This is the final page found in the zerO Books: the publisher’s statement. (Or at least it will be found on p. 219 of Towards Speculative Realism. I didn’t look to see if it was there in Capitalist Realism as well, but presumably it’s in all of them.) If Giordano Bruno were alive today, he might have written something like this:

“Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and the figure of the intellectual. Former public spaces – both physical and cultural – are now either derelict or colonized by advertising. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor. The informal censorship internalized and propagated by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a banal conformity that the propaganda chiefs of Stalinism could only ever have dreamt of imposing. Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse – intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist – is not only possible: it is already flourishing, in the regions beyond the striplit malls of so-called mass media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy. Zer0 is committed to the idea of publishing as a making public of the intellectual. It is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.”

I especially love the category of “expensively educated hacks.”